Corner of paradise

May 20, 2007

Sunday evening photo blogging:

A few days before I turned 13, my family moved from Idaho to St. Croix, the largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands. After a couple of months in a cramped apartment over a bank in Frederiksted, we moved to a big house in Carlton Estate. Around the house were acres of sometimes-green grass that I tended with a riding mower that often stopped until I crawled beneath it and reattached the belts. My brothers and I spent a lot of time climbing the trees in the back, gathering limes and mangoes and building forts.

When I wasn’t on the mower or in the trees, I was usually on the back porch, sitting at the table (it’s my grandmother sitting at the table in this photo, I think) or in one of the chairs reading a novel about submarine warfare or a thick James Clavell epic. I read voraciously on that porch, and I can still remember how my back would stick to the plastic cushions but the rest of my would be cooled by the tradewinds sweeping the island.

I have a fondness for reading novels in the tropics. Then again, if you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll have picked up that nugget.